1. Field of the Invention
The subject invention relates generally to communication apparatus and, more particularly, to an improved audio mute method and apparatus for a digital cordless telephone.
2. Description of Related Art
Analog cordless telephones are known in the prior art. While the voice quality of such telephones degrades relatively rapidly with distance, they have a noise response which exhibits a relatively gradual cumulative degradation of the signal. While digital cordless telephones utilizing spread spectrum techniques promise much improved voice quality and range, the noise response of such systems is abrupt, annoying to the user, and can exhibit large "booms."
Proposals for reducing such abrupt noise effects have included a simple algorithm according to which the output signal to the user is simply turned off when the channel is known to be bad; i.e. a simple switch. Other approaches use complex algorithms which look for "non" speech-like audio signals that occur when the channel goes bad and perform complex audio signal conditioning to reduce audio artifacts. The first approach is undesirable because the telephone user experiences a complete "dropout" or interruption of the voice to which he is listening. The second approach is undesirable because of high complexity and expense.